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E-Commerce

Shopping online can feel a bit impersonal. It’s all about looking at screens and filling virtual carts, and not so much about having a rich experience. Many consumers long for just that kind of experience — one that’s similar to walking into a store, looking at products, talking with an associate, and perhaps ultimately making a purchase. This is where e-commerce personalization tech comes in.

Amazon kicked off the completion of its acquisition of Whole Foods Market with steep price cuts on some products. Among those now available at lower prices are Whole Trade bananas, organic avocados, organic large brown eggs, responsibly-farmed salmon and tilapia, organic baby kale and baby lettuce, animal-welfare-rated 85 percent lean ground beef, and organic Gala and Fuji apples.

Walmart and Google, two of Amazon’s biggest rivals, on Wednesday announced a partnership that will let customers use Google’s Home speaker and a number of voice-assisted mobile devices to shop online at Walmart. Their mutual goal is to eat away at Amazon’s dominant share in the e-commerce shopping space and the smart speaker space, in order to curb the growth of its giant ecosystem.

Amazon Business, launched in April 2015, this week announced that it had reached the 1 million customer milestone. “This is rapid growth,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research. It’s attributable in part to a crossover effect from the large number of B2C customers Amazon has, he said. Amazon Business offers business-only pricing on millions of products, and access to more than 85,000 business sellers.

Amazon’s plan to buy Whole Foods Market has raised many new questions. If the company is successful in making the acquisition, and then successful in operating the business, it could transform the entire grocery industry. If we pull the camera back, we can see how success on the grocery side could foreshadow Amazon’s success in many other parts of the retail environment.

Amazon has hailed its third-annual Prime Day promotion as its single biggest global shopping event ever. Held earlier this week, it garnered an estimated $1 billion in sales, surpassing year-ago sales by 60 percent and beating the company’s prior Black Friday and Cyber Monday records. More members joined Prime on this year’s Prime Day than on any other single day in the company’s history.

Amazon is ready to disrupt the retail landscape for the third consecutive year, as it launches its July 11 Prime Day sale. The company will offer thousands of discounted items and special promotions to reward its Prime customers and increase their numbers, while rivals scramble to compete. Starting at 6 p.m. on Monday, Amazon will offer special curated deals on some of its biggest-selling items.

Amazon has set its third annual Prime Day promotion for July 11, promising its biggest-ever promotion with 30 hours of deals starting at 6:00 p.m. PT on July 10. The company has expanded the event to China, India and Mexico, to reach a total of 13 international markets. Amazon will go head-to-head with some of its most important international rivals, including Chinese e-commerce player Alibaba.

There is little doubt that the Internet has altered the way U.S. consumers think about shopping. E-commerce sales grew 15.6 percent in 2016 and now account for 11.7 percent of all retail sales, according to recent reports. Amazon accounts for a whopping 43 percent of those e-commerce sales. Amazon, in particular, has changed the way consumers think about e-commerce sales, or etail.

Visa this week announced the Visa Ready Program for Business Solutions, a strategic framework to help ensure that tech companies integrating with Visa’s B2B payment services and data solutions meet the company’s standards and are market ready. The program lets Visa’s tech partners quickly integrate and approve various Visa B2B payments solutions, including enhanced data, virtual card integration, payables automation, and payment controls.

Amazon on Tuesday introduced a Prime membership priced at $5.99 monthly for people on government assistance who have a valid Electronic Benefits Transfer card. A Prime membership ordinarily costs $10.99 per month, or $99 per year. Prime membership offers unlimited fast, free two-day shipping on more than 50 million eligible items and a variety of other benefits.

Walmart on Thursday reported soaring e-commerce growth during its fiscal first quarter, along with strong organic sales figures — results that suggest rival Amazon may have a fight on its hands. Online sales grew a stunning 63 percent during the quarter, perhaps in response to the company’s newly introduced free two-day shipping and its upgraded mobile app.

Every time I walk into a retail store, I grumble about the same pet peeve. After walking the aisles and filling the basket, you then must go through the most inefficient checkout process. First you unload everything in your basket, then it’s rung up, then you put the items in bags that go back into your basket before you can walk out of the store. There must be a better way.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned live-streaming video platform, has launched its highly anticipated online game store. It includes goodie bags and other incentives, both for gamers who take the plunge and streamers who provide the content. Twitch earlier this year announced that it would be selling games and in-game content directly through the online store, competing with major gaming sites like Steam.

Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart eCommerce U.S., on Tuesday discussed the company’s plans to launch a new venture, called “Store No. 8,” which will operate as a Silicon Valley incubator for new online stores. The move reflects Walmart’s ambition to catch up to Amazon in the e-commerce retail space. Lore unveiled the plans at the annual Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas.

mazon, which has moved forward aggressively in recent years to take control of its retail distribution chain, this week announced plans for a $1.5 billion Prime Air cargo hub in Kentucky. Amazon already employs more than 10,000 people at 11 fulfillment centers in the state. The company received about $40 million in government incentives to base its new air cargo hub in Hebron.

The European Commission on Thursday announced three separate investigations into online pricing and other sales practices that may have breached EU antitrust rules. The EC investigations will assess whether consumers were able to enjoy cross-border choice when it came to buying video games and consumer electronics, and making hotel accommodations online.

Do your customers come first? Companies spend a fortune to win and keep their customers. They advertise and market their products and services like crazy. Because of that cost, you would think every company would want to keep its customers happy. It’s more cost-effective to keep an existing customer than to win a new one. If that’s the case, why do some companies screw up customer care so badly?

Amazon on Thursday announced it will create more than 100,000 new jobs across the United States over the next 18 months, ranging from entry-level opportunities to positions for engineers and software developers. All will be full-time jobs with full benefits. Many of the jobs will be in new fulfillment centers currently under construction in Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey and other states.

Amazon on Wednesday announced that it had completed its first drone delivery in the UK. During the private customer trial period, packages of up to 5 pounds will be delivered within half an hour. The first live delivery took place a week ago, when a highly automated drone delivered a bag of popcorn and an Amazon Fire TV to a customer near Cambridge. It took 13 minutes for the order to arrive.

Amazon on Monday unveiled a prototype convenience store called “Amazon Go,” which uses mobile e-commerce, machine learning and computer vision to allow customers to make purchases without a cashier. The 1,800 square foot concept store in Seattle uses the company’s Just Walk Out technology, which incorporates many of the same concepts found in self-driving cars, Amazon said.

Before you sit down at your kitchen table and lose money shopping for Christmas and holiday gifts, you’d be well advised to learn the rules of the online shopping road. They can be very different from one vendor to another, so shop carefully. Some companies do a great job with customer care. Others don’t. I have been both delighted and burned several times, and I’d like to share some of my personal experiences to help you shop more safely.

Although online retailers on Monday offered deals to jumpstart the online holiday shopping season, Cyber Monday as a one-day event could be losing some of its attraction. Many retailers jumped the gun, and have been offering special online deals for days. Cyber Monday in recent years has ranked as the third largest holiday shopping day, following Super Saturday and Black Friday.

Shoppers came out in droves over the Black Friday weekend, spending a record $9.36 billion, a 16.4 percent increase from a year ago, according to Adobe Digital Insights. Black Friday sales hit a new record of $3.34 billion, a 21 percent jump from a year ago. This was the first-ever Black Friday with sales exceeding $3 billion. Thanksgiving Day sales were up 11.5 percent from a year ago.

Amazon last week launched Prime Reading — a new benefit for subscribers to its US$100-a-year Amazon Prime service that lets them access content for free. That content will come from more than 1,000 top Kindle books, Kindle Singles, magazines, comic books, children’s books, and classic works from writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem.